Historically speaking, the ideal of authenticity hasn't exactly stayed true to itself. In his canonical 1969 essay, ‘What Is an Author?’, the French theorist Michel Foucault locates an historical shift ‘at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century’, in which the introduction of copyright laws helped to establish our modern sense of authorship in relation to the idea of texts as property.1 But if copyright links the author to their text in legal terms, Foucault suggests it also invokes an older notion of the authority a text derives from its named creator. Scientific texts or historical accounts had long depended on naming authors for claims to empirical truth – both for their own authorship and by citing others (e.g. ‘Pliny tells us that […]’). While literary texts have often circulated anonymously, in folk tales and other oral forms, there is an analogous sense by which the moral or creative ‘truth’ of these narratives stems similarly from the naming of an author. Crediting the Iliad and Odyssey to a single poet, for instance – despite the poems’ own evidence of collaborative composition and the lack of evidence that ‘Homer’ ever existed – shows the need to invent a figure to fill that authoritative role, licensing these texts as products of a single creative mind, partly to account to for their enormous influence on ancient Greek culture and Western culture since. In Foucault's terms, the author's existence is less important than the idea of an author as ‘a function of discourse’. From the Greeks onwards, our way of experiencing and discussing texts has, in most cases, been structured by their ascription to a particular and original creator.

As Foucault suggests at the end of his essay, however, there may be something larger at stake. Rather than see this authorising effect as a peculiarity of writing or other artistic practices, the tendency to regard texts as the work of a single mind becomes an acutely existential matter in the degree to which it reflects our tendency to regard ourselves as the manifestation of a single and original consciousness. The author's individuality is tied to our own.